Google

Big and bigger

JOHN BATTELLE is Silicon Valley's Bob Woodward. One of the founders of Wired magazine, he has hung around Google for so long that he has come to be as close as any outsider can to actually being an insider. Certainly, Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, believe that it is safer to talk to Mr Battelle than not to do so.

The result is a highly readable account of Google's astonishing rise—the steepest in corporate history—from its origins in Stanford University to its controversial stockmarket debut and its current struggle to become a grown-up company while staying true to its youthfully brash motto, “Don't be evil.” Mr Battelle makes the reader warm to Google's ruling triumvirate—their cleverness and their good intentions—and fear for their future as they take on the world.

Google is one of the most interesting companies around at the moment. It has a decent shot at displacing Microsoft as the next great near-monopoly of the information age. Its ambition—to organise all the world's information, not just the information on the world wide web—is epic, and its commercial power is frightening. Beyond this, Google is interesting for the same reason that secretive dictatorships and Hollywood celebrities are interesting—for being opaque, colourful and, simply, itself.

The book disappoints only when Mr Battelle begins trying to explain the wider relevance of internet search and its possible future development. There is a lot to say on this subject, but Mr Battelle is hurried and overly chatty, producing laundry lists of geeky concepts without really having thought any of them through properly. This is not a fatal flaw. Read only the middle chapters, and you have a great book.